The news organizations are slimming down, firing and outsourcing, leaving many seasoned professionals out of steady work. At the same time, young journalism graduates see their chances of getting a job in the industry getting smaller and smaller. So freelancing is the option to consider. But where to find assignments, or people to do them? IAmNews is where both ends meet.

The concept is simple: “For publishers it is a place to assign news tasks to an international network of reporters and photographers and view a pool of content created by those reporters. For freelance reporters it is a place to take assignments or to post their news wire.”

The description is by Nir Ofir, founder of IAmNews. “Basically we are trying to bridge the gap between what both sides want, to connect with each other, but cannot do it today due to language barriers and the lack of single central spot for both sides to get familiar with each other when needed.”

The website resembles a social network, where you can create a profile presenting your professional background, favourite coverage topics, and expertise (writer, photographer, cameraman). There is a “newsroom” area, which is where the job proposals and pitches will be presented. And if you want, you can post your story and wait for it to be bidded by a news outlet. But don’t take it as a freelance wire news service.

“We think that iamnews is different. It is different since it is focused on a solution that will connect publishers and reporters in real time”, says Ofir, “we are not taking a major editorial part in our daily work. We are focusing in connecting people to people and not just stories to the media.”

How it works

And where does IAmNews take it’s cut? “Our business model is very simple. We act as the mediators and take a cut of the transactions between publishers and contributors.” And the only ones who get to pay anything are the publishers. “Registration is free, short and easy. Publishers will pay for the services of the journalists in our system per project or as a part of our awarding system.”

The project is still in Alpha mode, but you can already register and try out the current features. “By the end of the month we will open our newsroom that will enable publishers to create assignments (private and public) in our system. The system will act as an agent for all registered reporters and invite them to pitch their stories based on their location and expertise.”

Is IAmNews the foreboding of a new relationship model between the industry and the pros, for the future world news order ? “In times where most media companies shut down bureaus and cut down on resources, depending mostly on big generic wire companies, we see ourselves as a future alternative, bringing voices and footage that is cost effective and different.” Being the last the magic words.

The South Orange Patch was passing quite unnoticed until a couple of days ago was revealed as property of Google executive Tim Armstrong. This connection stirred the hearts and minds of those who have been asking Google to back journalism ventures, and this seems to be the spearhead of the company’s effort to develop a network of local media digital outlets.

So far the project is restricted to three suburban areas in New Jersey, but the goal is to present a project commercially viable in local markets, from which big companies are stepping out. With the heavy financing from Google this may actually happen.

Looking at it, i enjoyed the layout and especially the Twitter feed on top right corner. I don’t know why, but i felt closer to the people who make the Patch.

Patch, which has 20 employees and a plan to hire one journalist in every town it expands to, is now available only in 3 towns in New Jersey: Maplewood, Milburn and South Orange.

Gawker wonders whether Patch could be a Trojan horse for Google to get into the local news business? While it’s unlikely there are explicit plans, the lessons learned by Armstrong and Patch will naturally make their way into the thinking in Google’s local products group. (It’s a larger scale of what MSNBC’s Cory Bergman is doing with his independent newsblog MyBallard.)

Phil Meyer, my former professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Jeff Jarvis are on the editorial advisory board, so the New York City-based team is getting good advice. (More information and players here.)

Will this save journalism? A form of it, perhaps. The big-city dailies have been retrenching from the suburbs for years. But Patch is hiring one journalist per town, to cover local news with a heavy emphasis on charities. That’s exactly the kind of starter journalism job desperate grads take straight our of J-school, and work like heck to escape as fast as they can. The difference, in this Google-funded scenario, is that there won’t be anywhere else to go from there.

And why is Google letting Armstrong freelance as a startup investor? Google’s compliance cops have already greenlighted his investment in Associated Content, an ostensibly independent startup which lives off Google ads. Perhaps it’s because his startup experiments may well help his employer.

Could Patch be a Trojan horse for Google to get into the local news business?

Jeff Jarvis organized at CUNY the second conference dedicated to new business models for news. For those who weren’t able to go to New York to attend to the summit, there was always the chance to watch the whole thing live online. You missed it? Don’t worry, it’s all here, on demand. Have a nice weekend.

The day begins with informational and perhaps inspirational talks from people who are creating and implementing new models. Samir Arora of Glam and Tom Evslin of Fractals of Change will talk about new network models for media and business in the connected internet. Edward Roussel of the Telegraph and Dave Morgan of Tennis (and founder of Tacoda) will explore new structures for news companies – e.g., spinning off or outsourcing what once were core tasks but are now costs burdens, such as distribution, production, and even sales.

We will have two lightning rounds of presentations by entrepreneurs and executives who are executing new models. We will list those on the agenda.

In the afternoon, we will move into Aspen-Institute-like sessions in five groups, each charged with coming back with specific models, suggestions, and needs:

* Network models for news

* New structures for news organizations

* New structures for news operations (newsrooms), including new efficiencies and new focus leading to new job descriptions.

* New revenue models for news – advertising and more and what is needed to support these new models

* Public support for journalism – there are no white knights but can the public (in the form of foundations, corporations, and individual contributions) help support elements of journalism?

The groups’ leaders and rappateurs will return to a closing plenary session to share their work. And then we break out the well-deserved wine.

And where did the stories went? Into blogs and social networks. A must read.

There are no stories in today’s top stories.

It’s all sound bites and lots of effect – punch lines, cutting here and there and everywhere, but rarely that crucial detail that will grab your attention for more than a few moments.

The most popular print news ends up being a Metro, or some similar thin collection of captions, titles, and photographs. The news business being in the business of getting the news published and circulated, killed the story – your stories.

This might be the top reason why print is dying. Editors deliver a product that is packaged as a self contained, portable medium readers can consume on the go. MacNews with cell phone conversations on the side. You will feel satisfied, but hardly nourished.

We are stitching together our own stories. With the help of new media, we add our own flavor to the news that matters to us. The additional dimensions come in many flavors – comments on blogs, feeds, online communities – more and more away the conversation happens from mainstream media sites.

Writing for the web implies using a different set of rules than for print. Both the conceptual and graphic organization of the information has to be done in a rather different way, using links for external complementary data, making space between ideas for easier reading, simplifying the stream of ideas while keeping all of it’s informational potential for the reader.

But other values rise when it comes to capturing the audience for news websites. SEO has a great influence to bring more or less visits to a given article. Using the right words we can increase the number of readings of a certain article, and then the news companies can claim to the advertisers an inflated audience, thanks to the use of popular Google keywords, but that aren’t even closely related to the article’s content.

Charlie Brooker explains this situation quite well and this issue becomes of most relevance if we think that the presence of certain images and words in the frontpages has always conditioned our attention and interest in the moment of buying a newspaper, but on the web the search mechanisms made the relevance and visibility of some texts something totally artificial. The use of social bookmarking to credibilize content helps to separate the good from the bad, but often the best contents don’t reach the majority of the users.

The ethical question raised here is should a journalist use highly valued SEO contents to compose the title and the first paragraph of an article? I believe it’s all a matter of common sense, since when we get fooled by a website we never go back there again.

So, to all of you who ended up here because of Cristiano Ronaldo Lost free sex videos in iPhone, my sincere apologies. Once again, do not treat your readers like idiots. The backlash will be immediate.

And wait, it gets worse. These phrases don’t just get lobbed in willy-nilly. No. A lot of care and attention goes into their placement. Apparently the average reader quickly scans each page in an “F-pattern”: reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the left-hand side. If there’s nothing of interest within that golden “F” zone, he or she will quickly clear off elsewhere.

Which means your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That’s an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it’s just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed.

We can no longer live without a cellphone. It can be used for anything, even for phone calls. But what is we used them to assume our role as Citizan Journalists?

This is the starting point of the project headed by Guy Berger, that is promoting workshops for high school students in South Africa, to learn how to write news in 140 characters. Now it only takes to use the rest of the features to become truly mobile – and intrinsically, due to the technical characteristics of the device- multimedia citizen journalism.

And there’s a question apropos: can those messages be written in the current sms abbreviations to be later decoded at the newsrooms?

In August, we start some initial workshops with high school learners, to discuss with them what it takes to be “citizen journalists” – contributing content that the mainstream will publish.

What’s more, the content is constrained by being 140 characters long – sms is the method of comms for now. Over the course of 8 workshops, 80 learners in their penultimate school year will be trained about optimum Cit-journ in this way … all over two months.